Across the continent, healthcare systems are showing signs of critical stress. Emergency departments are closing, general practitioners are overworked, and wait times for specialist care continue to grow. While the drivers of this crisis are complex, the result is clear: healthcare access and quality are deteriorating under the weight of rising demand and limited resources.
The latest OECD data puts numbers to this crisis. By 2050, nearly a third of Europe’s population will be over 65, creating enormous strain on care systems. One in five Europeans is already living with multiple chronic conditions. At the same time, many countries face acute shortages of nurses and doctors, with 18% of practicing physicians expected to retire within the next decade. To fill the gap, countries are increasingly relying on foreign-trained professionals, and burnout rates are soaring.
This blog post is based on the insights of our playbook "Before It Hurts: How Data Cuts Costs for Healthcare Payors". Previously, we talked about the lifestyle choices of users and how they affect the current healthcare. However, today we expand the conversation beyond lifestyle behavior to the institutional pressure points of European healthcare systems. We uncover how these macro-level issues are putting healthcare systems under sustained pressure and how shifting to preventive care can help alleviate the burden. We’ll walk through the key stressors, systemic gaps, the role of digital data infrastructure, and what payers and policymakers can do to drive transformation.
A Systemic Health Crisis, Not Just a Lifestyle One
While lifestyle changes target individual behaviors, the real pressure lies within the structural limitations of healthcare systems across Europe. Hospitals and outpatient care centers are under a lot of pressure, not because people are simply making poor health choices, but because the system was never built for the kind of demand it now faces. Aging populations, persistent chronic diseases, and budgetary constraints are converging into a perfect storm. Without strategic intervention, the entire ecosystem risks being overwhelmed.
Recent OECD data from 2024 confirms the scale of the crisis:
- Europe’s healthcare workforce is aging. Nearly 20% of physicians are over 65 and heading for retirement within the next 10 years.
- Countries are increasingly dependent on foreign-trained healthcare professionals to fill staffing gaps.
- Across the EU, more than 50% of total healthcare spending already goes toward treating chronic conditions.
- In some countries, patients wait weeks to months for specialist appointments, while nurses and general practitioners face burnout and high attrition.
Crisis Management in Healthcare: The Missing Prevention Layer
Most crisis management strategies in European healthcare focus on managing acute needs: increasing hospital bed capacity, coordinating emergency protocols, and responding to seasonal surges. While these measures are necessary, they fail to address the chronic root causes driving demand. To genuinely reduce system strain, prevention must be integrated as a core strategy, not an afterthought. You can get more details on the healthcare shift from reactive to proactive here!
Consider four areas where prevention offers high leverage:
- Reducing Avoidable Hospitalizations: Studies have shown that a significant share of emergency admissions could be prevented through earlier interventions, especially for chronic disease patients who could benefit from home monitoring and proactive care.
- Delaying Onset of Chronic Disease: Early detection of preclinical conditions such as hypertension, prediabetes, or metabolic syndrome can delay the need for medication or hospitalization, yielding savings across the patient journey.
- Empowering Patients Through Real-Time Data: With the help of wearable devices and digital platforms, patients can actively monitor their metrics and understand the impact of daily behaviors, improving adherence to care plans and easing the load on GPs and specialists. You can read more about mobile health here!
- Expanding Outpatient and Home-Based Care: With digital health tools, care teams can triage and manage low-risk cases remotely, freeing up capacity for acute care and improving patient comfort.
When implemented systematically, prevention shifts healthcare systems from reactive firefighting to proactive management, providing resilience, efficiency, and better outcomes across the board.
What Payors Can Do?
Payors, from insurers to national health funds, play a critical role in shifting healthcare systems toward preventive care. These stakeholders are uniquely positioned to drive transformation at the municipal and systemic level by embedding prevention into reimbursement and governance models.
- Prevention Contracts: Transition from fee-for-service models to outcomes-based contracts that reward measurable improvements in population health, such as better biomarker profiles, improved medication adherence, or avoided hospitalizations.
- Digital Screening Pipelines: Implement municipal- or insurer-level digital screening initiatives using wearable and app-based data to flag risk profiles early, allowing for proactive engagement and support.
- Longitudinal Value Metrics: Replace narrow annual cost targets with three- to five-year value-based indicators that reflect long-term prevention gains, especially relevant for aging and high-risk cohorts.
- Reimbursement for Remote Monitoring: Allocate funding for validated remote patient monitoring tools that reduce strain on primary care infrastructure while enabling continuous care. Get more details about remote work in healthcare here!
This shift from volume-based to value-based care has long been discussed. But today, it is no longer theoretical; it is a strategic necessity. Realigning incentives at both the payor and municipal levels ensures a more resilient, prevention-first healthcare system.
Real-Time Data As The Backbone of Preventive Infrastructure
To maximize prevention in a healthcare environment under pressure, real-time, clinically relevant, and interoperable data is essential. This data enables care teams and municipalities to intervene proactively before a condition worsens or a crisis erupts. You can get more details by reading our blog post on predictive analysis!
This is where wearable-integrated platforms like Thryve provide measurable leverage:
- Continuous Biometrics: Passive collection of heart rate, stress, sleep patterns, temperature, and physical activity creates a longitudinal view of health.
- Device Integration: Connecting to wearables and medical-grade sensors via one single API, enabling broad access without hardware lock-in.
- Privacy-First Architecture: Built to meet GDPR standards, ensuring full user consent and control, critical for ethical use of personal health data.
- From Signals to Insights: Raw sensor streams are transformed into clinically actionable insights, allowing care teams, municipal agencies, and payors to respond swiftly and effectively. Check our blog post on wearable data shaping behavior changes!
Without this data infrastructure, prevention remains aspirational. With it, prevention becomes a scalable, strategic advantage.
Strategic Benefits for Healthcare Systems
When prevention becomes measurable, scalable, and integrated across care pathways, it creates lasting system-wide value. Here’s how it impacts healthcare delivery:
- Fewer Emergency Room Visits: Real-time monitoring tools can detect early signs of deterioration, allowing care teams to intervene before a situation escalates into an emergency. This reduces the burden on overcrowded ER departments and ensures capacity is preserved for true acute care cases.
- Lower Per-Patient Costs: By reducing the frequency of hospitalizations, unnecessary tests, and redundant appointments, prevention cuts overall healthcare spending. These cost savings become even more pronounced over time as patient outcomes improve.
- Better Chronic Disease Outcomes: Conditions like hypertension, diabetes, and COPD can be stabilized or delayed with continuous lifestyle tracking and early alerts. Preventive interventions reduce disease progression and minimize complications, leading to better long-term management.
- Higher Workforce Efficiency: By minimizing avoidable visits and enabling remote care, prevention tools free up clinicians’ time. This reduces burnout, increases job satisfaction, and helps address staff shortages.
- Improved Patient Satisfaction: Patients benefit from more personalized, proactive care that aligns with their day-to-day lives. Empowered by data and real-time feedback, they feel more in control and more connected to their care teams.
Together, these benefits represent more than incremental improvements; they offer a blueprint for what a modern, resilient healthcare system must prioritize in the 21st century.
Thryve's Contribution to Healthcare Crisis Prevention
The European healthcare crisis isn’t coming. It’s here. But by shifting focus from treatment to prediction, from volume to value, and from fragmentation to interoperability, there is still time to reverse course. Payers, providers, and public health agencies must see prevention not as a moral imperative, but as a survival strategy. The future of healthcare will be built on platforms, not paperwork.
At Thryve, our mission is to make health data infrastructure a default component of every prevention strategy. Because prevention isn't a "nice to have" anymore. It's the new frontline of crisis management. That’s why we offer:
- Seamless Device Integration: Easily connect over 500 other health monitoring devices to your platform via a single API, eliminating the need for multiple integrations.
- Standardized Biometric Models: Automatically harmonize biometric data streams, including heart rate, sleep metrics, skin temperature, activity levels, and HRV, making the data actionable and consistent across devices.
- GDPR-Compliant Infrastructure: Ensure full compliance with international privacy and security standards, including GDPR and HIPAA. All data is securely encrypted and managed according to the highest privacy requirements.
Let’s take care of today's health system, so in the future it can take care of us!
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And to get more information on healthcare crisis solutions, you can download our playbook for free here!
